Edith Stein died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her niece Waltraut Stein explains in the translator's note to Stein's spiritual texts that she was both “hidden in a convent and hidden in God during a time when the world around her was caught up in the conflagration ignited by Adolph Hitler.” This statement is only partially true. For while Stein spent the last decade of her life cloistered, to her mind she was responding to the “conflagration” in the most direct way she knew how: she came out of “hiding” by way of the words she wrote from the convent, and she paid for this revelation with her life.

In this chapter I intend to draw aside her nun's veil to show how Stein located and expressed her Jewish identity while she practiced as a Carmelite nun. Through close examination of her autobiography Life in a Jewish Family, I will show Stein's sense of her Jewish voice. Further, I want to demonstrate, by looking at Stein from a postmodern perspective, that her sense of identity is queer – not in a gendered or a sexual sense, but in a religious and social sense. To look at her from this angle deepens our understanding of Stein as a multifaceted person who was loyal to her Jewish origins, and it helps shed light on the complex nature of religious identity.